War Of Words Over The Nation's Public Schools

July 24, 1996|By Linda Bowles. Creators Syndicate.

Candidate Bob Dole has finally addressed the most critical issue in America today, one that should, but probably will not, dominate the presidential debates: the catastrophic, disaster-inducing failure of public education.

Thomas Jefferson explained why this issue is of such overriding importance. In a letter to Col. Charles Yancey, he wrote, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

The same sentiment was crisply articulated in the Texas Declaration of Independence, written in 1836: "It is an axiom in political science that unless a people are educated and enlightened it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty or the capacity for self-government."

Surely there is no need to spend more time citing the mountain of evidence that details the massive failure of government schools to teach millions of children to read, write, reason or do simple arithmetic.

Surely there is no need to again spell out all the symptoms of moral collapse that warn us our society might soon be overrun and buried by an onrushing avalanche of ignorance and anarchy.

Unhappy citizens must now face the reality that they have been throwing an increasing amount of money at education for years, with dwindling returns.

Education in America is a state-protected monopoly, run primarily for the benefit of powerful trade unions, liberal ideologues and educrats, and secondarily for the benefit of children.

These special-interest groups have an insidious relationship with the White House and the Democratic Party. In exchange for money and political support, they are protected from competition and given larger and larger budgets with which to produce lower and lower test scores.

Government schools are a paradigm of government in America: inefficiency without accountability and underachievement without consequence.

If the Founders had anticipated this corruption, they would have insisted upon a wall of separation between education and the state.

The largest union in America is the 2.1-million member National Education Association. It is not a professional association, but rather a hard-hitting, heavy-booted, big-time labor union that waves a big stick and demands tribute.

Like most trade unions, teachers' unions are status quo organizations. They hate change. They are against merit pay, competency testing of teachers, standardized testing of students, parental authority, decentralization and school choice. They are terrified of competition.

It is no wonder that the growth of educational unions correlates almost perfectly with the decline in the quality, and increase in the cost, of public education.

Unfortunately, most school boards and parent-teacher associations have rolled over and become a part of the problem. It would appear that an observation by Mark Twain in 1897 still applies today in many cases: "In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards."

The answer to the problem of government schools is school choice. The purpose is to give back to parents control over the education of their own children and rescue not only the children, but the entire school establishment, including teachers, from domination and exploitation by the aforementioned unholy triumvirate of educrats, trade-union bosses and left-wing, political extremists.

Our society is being torn apart by deep-rooted disagreements over issues such as sex education, prayer in schools, outcome-based education, evolution, feminism, creationism, school busing, abortion and multiculturalism.

Empowering parents to choose the school they consider best and most wholesome for their own children would have a cooling effect on these overheated conflicts.

Since the children of the Gores and the Clintons are in private schools, protected from the afflictions of a government-school education, why may not poor parents, empowered with school choice, also protect their children from government-school violence, incompetent educators, gangs, guns, drugs, morally corrosive peer pressures and new-age bureaucrats who hand out condoms and bad personal advice?

Study after study has shown that the most avid supporters of educational vouchers are poor parents whose kids are trapped and segregated in inner-city ghetto schools.

Incredibly, it is liberals who are fighting the hardest to keep the government school foot on the neck of the poor.

It's great to be alive and conservative, watching liberals expose to the world that they are, deep down where it really counts, troubled by freedom, repelled by diversity, terrified of choice and afraid of change.